My Femboy System

There’s a specific kind of dread that comes not from danger—but from expectation.

When you’re about to walk into a room knowing that you’re not being hunted, ambushed, or killed...but wanted. Desired. Not for your skills, not for your mind, but for something fleshier. Hungrier. Like the price of survival had suddenly grown hips and slipped into heels.

That’s what walking into Captain Kane’s private quarters felt like.

I stepped through the door and into another world.

It was dim and quiet. The kind of quiet that pressed in around the edges of your thoughts and made your breath sound too loud. Light from oil lanterns flickered over glass cases filled with impossible artifacts—bones curled into spirals, blades too thin to be real, stones that hummed softly in colors I didn’t have names for. I passed a jar filled with preserved petals that floated in a thick golden syrup, and for a moment I thought they moved—reaching for me like they recognized me.

The books were worse. Shelves of them. Stacked high, carved deep. Row after row of dusty spines in languages that didn’t belong on any map I’d ever seen.

I ran my fingers across them as if they might whisper something back. One cracked open at my touch—delicate, ancient—and pages flipped of their own accord until I found myself staring at a diagram of something alive and impossible. I didn’t understand a word, but I felt it in my stomach like a second heartbeat.

And then—

Chug—chug—chug—

The unmistakable sound of a throat putting down liquor with the enthusiasm of a man trying to forget several wars.

I turned.

Captain Kane stood at the back of the room, holding a bottle by the neck. Not wine. Something older. Dark and red, almost black, poured into a thick crystal goblet and downed like water. He caught my stare and smirked, then offered the bottle with a lazy little bow.